Scorpion in the Sea

FIVE

The Captain sat in stony silence at the head of the minuscule wardroom table. There were five other officers in the wardroom: his Deputy Commander, who was also the political officer, the Operations officer, and the two department heads, the Weapons Officer and the Chief Engineer. Behind the Captain’s chair stood the Musaid, the senior Chief Petty Officer in the boat. The political officer was speaking. Still speaking.

“The error, therefore, is a collective error. The fact that the watch officer lost depth control and broached the sail is nothing more or less than the grand summation of training errors, admittedly poor discipline on his part, and insufficient qualification time in his training program aboard Al Akrab. It is not politically responsible to blame only the watch officer. The operational error has its antecedents in the doings of the collective organization: just as the organization’s successes are always due to the efforts of the group, so are the organization’s errors also attributable to the organization as a whole. That is my doctrinal position.”

He sat back, and folded his arms. The Captain refused to look at him, but continued to stare straight ahead, his black eyes focused on the opposite bulkhead. There were times when every submarine commander had wanted to put his political officer into a torpedo tube and fire him into the abyss. This was one of them.

The Captain was a tall, thin man, with a walnut brown, hawk-like face, all angles, ridges of muscle, and corners of fine bone. His eyes were wide set and jet black under pronounced eyebrows, the legacy of some Turkoman in his Bedouin heritage. His nose was short and boldly hooked, reinforcing the resemblance to a raptor; his lips were thin and set in a rigid, flat line. There was an air of latent tension about him, in the way he stared at things and people, and in the way he carried his wiry body, leaning forward, hands in front and moving, as if ready to seize something.

His silence drew out the tension. The entire mission depended precisely and exactly on not being detected, and all the political officer’s socialist cant did not change that fact. The Soviets had provided excellent training in their submarine school; they had offset that excellence by draping the burden of socialist political camel dung across the shoulders of every military commander in the form of his political officer.

“Does anyone else wish to speak?” he asked, softly.

The political officer, who simply loved to hear the sound of his own voice, sat forward as if to start again. The Captain held up one finger in his general direction, as if in warning. Gauging the look on the Captain’s taut face, the political officer subsided back into his chair.

“Does anyone else wish to speak?”

There was silence around the table. The hum of ventilator fans, and the occasional creaking of the hull from the pressure of 85 meters depth were the only sounds. Outside the curtained entrance to the tiny wardroom, a steward was arranging plates and cups on the tray table, waiting to set up the wardroom for the evening meal. The Captain looked at each one of them in turn.

“Then I shall speak. And you shall listen. The mistake may be collective, but the punishment for the next such mistake shall be individually extreme. Most extreme.” He paused, while the four officers at the table looked at him in growing apprehension. Once again, the Deputy Commander opened his mouth as if to speak, and then shut it abruptly. The Captain continued, training his eyes around the table like a stereo-optic gunsight.

“As all of you know, our mission here is to lurk in the sea, and to await the arrival of the American aircraft carrier Coral Sea, the carrier that bombed our homeland in 1986. Bombed the Jamahiriya, and killed a favorite child of the Colonel. Our sacred mission is to surprise that carrier, and to sink it if possible as it makes its way into port. The Coral Sea is now in the Caribbean. It will return soon to its base at Mayport. Our intelligence service knows approximately when the carrier is due back to this port, but not precisely when. We shall be informed in time to prepare. Until we receive that signal, our mission is to explore our attack patrol area and to remain undetected!”

He paused for an instant.

“I have told you all this before,” he reminded them.

He paused again to sip from a glass of cold tea. None of the others moved.

“If we are discovered before that date,” he continued, “all of this is for nothing. Our journey of four thousand miles, the hours and hours of training, the deception of all the Soviet advisors in our homeland, the stress of living submerged for endless days, the danger of discovery from all the American warships which train in this area, all for nothing. This crew has been handpicked, carefully indoctrinated, confirmed to be politically reliable, and supposedly trained to the highest degree of operational readiness. This submarine has been given every piece of replacement machinery we needed, and the other five boats of our Navy have been stripped as required to do this. We have their spare parts. We have their working torpedoes. We have some of their crew.”

His voice was controlled, but flat with menace. The tension in his face made the words seem like bullets.

“This mission has been three years in the planning. Three years. In great secrecy. At great expense. No one in the rest of our Navy knows where we are. Our Soviet advisors do not know — they think only that we are loose in the Gulf of Sidra. All of the Soviet submarine advisors have been taken to the South for a special hunting expedition, away from the base, away from the decoy that lies at our berth at Ras Hilal. If we are discovered out here by the Americans, 100 miles off the American coast, hiding in their own Navy operating areas, it will all be for nothing. And they will kill us. They will hunt us down and kill us, because our very presence will be an affront to the pride of the great American Navy. So.”

He paused, moved back in his chair, and unsnapped the holster on his right hip. Behind him the Musaid tensed. Every Commanding Officer in the armed forces carried a sidearm, even aboard ship. He withdrew a large Russian automatic pistol, and set it down on the wardroom table. Four pairs of eyes looked down at it, and then back at him. He gestured towards the pistol with his chin.

“I will personally execute,” he declared, “the next individual who does what the watch officer did this morning: exposes this mission, and this boat. He lost depth control less than a mile from a fishing boat at morning twilight. If anyone on that boat crew saw us, we may be in desperate trouble. Our only possible salvation is that their Navy will not believe it, and we must depend on their arrogance for that. Do you understand me? Shall I demonstrate my resolve for you?”

The officers did not know whether to shake their heads or nod. They remained silent. Finally the Deputy spoke up.

“Your orders are clear. We shall inform the entire crew. It will not happen again.”

“Very well. I have nothing more to say.”

They were interrupted by a tapping on the wardroom door coaming.

“Enter,” ordered the Captain.

A petty officer from the control room pushed aside the curtain, and entered nervously. The tension in the room was palpable. He handed the Captain a contact report, his eyes widening as he saw the pistol. The Captain opened the piece of paper, and scanned it quickly. His face darkened.

“Very well. I have seen it. I will be there at once.”

The messenger withdrew, fumbling with the curtains as he did so. The Captain looked around at the four faces again.

“Now we shall see. We have detected an American destroyer which has begun to ping, to the north of us, where we were this morning when this collective mistake was made.”

The political officer wet his lips, and seemed to shrink in his chair. There were no telephones to the political security directorate at headquarters out here, and that pistol was still on the table. The Captain was staring at them.

“Go and tell every man what I have decreed.”

They scrambled out of their chairs, and left the wardroom one after the other, being careful not to get too close to the Captain. When they were gone, the steward poked his head in through the curtain. He saw the Captain, and then he saw the black pistol. He made a squeaking noise, and hurriedly withdrew.

The Captain sat there for a moment, gathering his thoughts. The fools. The simple fools. The contact report had caused his stomach to grab with cold fear. He felt sick that the whole thing might already be over. He forced himself to take a deep breath, and then another. Behind him the Musaid moved discreetly. The Captain pushed back his chair, and turned in it to look up at the Musaid.

The Musaid was a bulky man with a coarse, Turkish face, a full black beard and moustache, and fierce eyes. He was not so much tall as broad, and he was ten years older than the Captain. He had been the Captain’s bodyguard and shadow for nine years, and had been his trusted confidant since he took command of the Al Akrab. They had gone through submarine training together in Sevastopol. The Captain looked up at him for a moment, and then nodded.

“Musaid. You have something to say.”

“Pasha,” he said, using the archaic title. “The crewmen are volunteers. This edict will make them something else. For fear of making a mistake, they may do nothing when the situation demands that they do something.” He seemed ready to say more, but then fell silent.

The Captain had great respect for the senior Chief, who held a position roughly equivalent to what the American submarine Navy called Chief of the Boat. The Musaid had served in the submarine force right from the beginning, being one of the first non-commissioned officers recruited from the Army into the fledgling Navy, and one of the first group selected to be sent off for training in the Soviet Navy submarine force. He had more military experience than did the Captain.

Publicly, wherever the Captain went ashore, the Musaid was right behind him. Onboard, when the Captain arrived in the Control room or any other compartment in the boat, the Musaid appeared immediately, even at sea. But over the four years the Captain had been in command, the Musaid had become much more than a senior orderly, bodyguard and driver. He had become the executor of any policies affecting the enlisted crew, and he had become a trusted advisor. The fact that he was older than the Captain made it possible, in a delicate but substantial sense, for them to consider each other as professional contemporaries. The Captain valued this relationship, and was very careful not to do or say anything to disturb it.

“Musaid, you may be right,” the Captain replied. “But for now, my edict stands. It concerns the officers more than the crew. I will weigh its effect upon the crew. It would be helpful if you explained to them that this is a matter for the officers to worry about. In a few days, I will seek your counsel. It would also be helpful in the meantime if you could spend much of your time in the control room to ensure that the watch officers do not make any more mistakes like that, at least for a while. After my orders have been announced, we shall confer again.”

“It shall be done, Pasha. I will be there until the mission is completed.”

The Captain nodded absently as the Musaid withdrew. He made a mental note to keep an eye on the Musaid, who tended to take things too literally. He would more than likely post himself in the Control room until he dropped. He sat back in his chair at the head of the table, aware of the steward waiting outside, and of the need to go to the control room. He forced the distracting session with his department heads out of his mind for the moment, reaching for equilibrium. He reflected on the mission, harking back in his mind to the night they had departed, almost a month ago, trying to recapture the excitement, almost as an antidote to the dread he was now beginning to feel.

The submarine had glistened like a killer whale in the moonlight bathing the Ras Hilal base, her sides black and glossy, her conning tower raked above the rounded hull like a thick, unyielding dorsal fin. He had waited on the pier by the brow, raising his face to the cool air streaming in from the surrounding desert and breathing deeply, savoring the desert smells of sand and fading daytime heat. Behind him, the exhaust from the idling main engines had rumbled at the waterline, alternatively throwing up hot bubbles and steaming spray as a low swell rolled up the submarine’s sides from the harbor entrance. Pungent, wet clouds of diesel exhaust wafted over the conning tower above him, sending the two lookouts there into occasional fits of coughing. The Captain called it the conning tower, not the sail of modern parlance. Dhows have sails. Submarines have conning towers.

Where are these people, he had thought. It is time to begin. He stifled a sigh of exasperation. Staff officers. Always making a great commotion about nothing. Neither he nor his fellahin needed a sendoff. His pulse had quickened. It is time, he had thought, impatiently. It is time.

He had looked around at the submarine base buildings and the surrounding harbor, darkened and still at this late hour. Dim green and red lights from channel buoys winked and blinked around the harbor. The low swell washed quietly against the ballast rocks under the pier, stirring the flotsam. He had wondered how many people sleeping in the dusty barracks or on the patrol boats at the next pier had any idea of what was going on. Surely the engine noise must have aroused some curiosity, but there were no signs of life in the darkened buildings. He remembered shivering; the desert’s night air threading its way into the harbor from the sand hills above the base reminded him of his proper antecedents.

To the east, the lights of Benghazi were illuminating the horizon. At each end of the pier there were two linehandlers sitting against the bitts, waiting for the order to cast her off. Both figures appeared to be dozing, their bodies dark lumps in the bright moonlight. A third man was waiting by the brow, sipping tea from a mug. Just forward of the conning tower stood the silhouetted and commanding figure of his Musaid, looking like a Janissary from the old times of the Turkish empire.

On the other side of the pier, his submarine’s twin, the Al Khyber, lay silent and dark, like a dead ship. Not surprising, he thought. She and some of the others had been gutted to outfit the AI Akrab. Across the harbor, a tugboat had been standing off its own stub pier, its running lights dimmed, a long, familiar shape tied up alongside. At a nearby pier, the other four Foxtrot class submarines lay nested in two groups of two. There were a few figures visible on their decks; the departure of one of their own on an actual mission was an unusual event.

The Captain remembered scanning the single road that led down the hillside from the base main gate, but there was still no sign of the staff car. He had mentally cursed all staff officers again, and then had seen the headlights.

The car had come down the road quickly, moving faster than most vehicles would on the bumpy, poorly paved road. The base was not that old, but maintenance, on roads as well as ships, was fairly indifferent in his Navy. The car’s headlights swooped erratically as the car negotiated potholes, throwing bright white light over the windows of the dark buildings and the storage sheds along the waterfront. The Captain had drawn himself up to his full height, just under six feet, a disadvantage in the cramped confines of a submarine, as if to give emphasis to his impatience. He had glanced over his shoulder to make sure there was no one from his crew loafing about on the submarine’s deck, but there were only the two faces visible up on the conning tower, and the motionless silhouette of the Musaid.

His orders from Defense headquarters had been specific. Wait for the official goodbyes, and then depart immediately. He glanced at his watch once more as the car drove down the pier itself. The two linehandlers sat up and rubbed their eyes as the headlights swept over them. The Captain had noticed that this was a large Mercedes, not an Army staff car. Strange.

The car had pulled up sharply and extinguished its headlights. The driver, a bulky man dressed in civilian clothes, had levered himself out of the car and looked around, inspecting the full length of the pier. The Captain did not recognize him, but then had been stunned to see who was getting out of the right front seat. Him! He had stiffened to attention as the Colonel came over to him, dressed in the desert robes of his Bedouin tribe, his black eyes glittering in the moonlight. The Captain remembered feeling a surge of pride that the Colonel himself had come. He had been so excited that he had forgotten to salute.

Behind the Colonel, an elderly Army officer and a civilian had stood up out of the car, but they had not approached. The Captain had recognized the officer; he had been a Major General before the last coup attempt. Then all ranks had been reduced to satisfy the Colonel’s dictum that Colonel was now to be the highest rank in the land. The driver had continued to look around, at the pier, the submarine, and the base behind them.

“Muqaddam Muhammad Al Khali! Greetings,” the Colonel had rasped. “A good night to begin a hunt, is it not?”

The Captain remembered trying to find his voice. His throat was dry, and his heart had been straining with excitement. “An excellent night, Colonel. For a most unusual hunt.”

The Colonel had smiled, turning his dark, angular face to survey the submarine, his eyes glinting with eager malice. The figures up on the conning tower had become motionless as they realized who was speaking to the Captain.

“This hunt must succeed, Muhammad Al Khali,” the Colonel had declared.

He had turned back to lock those malevolent eyes on the Captain, his syllables precise in that dry, almost whispering tone familiar to everyone in the land.

“The cries for justice echo still on the desert air. This mission — do you doubt its success?”

“No, Colonel,” the Captain had replied. “The justice of it is clear. But success will depend on several things. The American Navy is many and strong.”

The Colonel’s face had clouded, his mouth setting in a bitter line. The Captain could not look away from this face, with its intense, black eyes and jagged creases and wrinkles. A jackal’s face, he thought; and like the jackal, the Colonel was cruel, tough, intelligent, and a merciless survivor. The Captain had felt a thrill of fear, while wondering if he had gone too far with his comment about the American Navy.

“The American Navy must be made to pay for the crimes they have committed, crimes against the Jamahiriya, the people, the revolution, my family,” rasped the Colonel, his voice rising. His eyes transfixed the Captain. “Your kinsmen, too, do not forget.”

“Yes, Colonel. I have not forgotten.”

The Colonel had looked again at the submarine. “This ship, this Al Akrab, it is ready?” he had asked, and then continued before the Captain could reply.

“Al Akrab,” he had mused. “The Scorpion. A most fitting name for what you are preparing to do. To go to the Americans’ coast, to lurk in the sea, hidden but with stinger ready, and the strength to stab when the time comes. We have given you all that you need for the voyage and the mission?”

“Yes, Colonel,” the Captain had replied. “The provision has been generous. We are indeed ready.”

The Colonel had nodded. “This is good. This is a worthy hunt. You will surprise them, never fear. Our security has been excellent. They will never, ever expect such a thing.”

“That is our vital advantage, Colonel,” the Captain had replied, now suddenly anxious to be away. “But we must depart, and submerge before the next satellite.”

The Colonel had grimaced again, grinding his teeth. “Their satellites are the devil’s work. But I wanted to speak to you personally, to confirm the trust. You are my kinsman, Muhammad Al Khali, and I yours. The blood of our tribes is the same. It is for this reason that you command this mission. You are zealous, and you are trusted. And you must trust me, as I trust you. You and your crew are not being dispatched to die, but to avenge the great American crimes. The Jamahiriya will ensure that you return safely.”

The Captain had nodded his head in appreciation. “Our trust is complete, Colonel. We shall exact justice, as it is written.”

“Go then, Scorpion, and strike the Godless Americans. It is God’s will.” The Colonel had stepped forward and embraced the Captain in the traditional kiss of greeting and departure.

“Inshallah,” the Captain had intoned. “As God wills it.”

The Colonel had turned away, his robes floating silently around his feet, and the waiting men had scrambled to get back in the car even as the Colonel climbed in. His door had been barely closed before the driver started up, turned the big car around in one smooth motion on the pier, and drove back towards the shore. The Captain had released his breath, resisting an impulse to wipe his brow. He had turned to look down the pier.

“Linehandlers!” he had roared, and the two men at either end of the submarine sprang to their feet. Two petty officers rose out of a hatch on the submarine’s deck, one heading forward, the other aft. They must have been waiting right below the hatch, he remembered thinking. Watchful, as they should be. As they would all have to be for this mission. The nerves had thrummed in his arms and legs as he strode quickly up the brow, turned forward, nodded once to the Musaid, and climbed the ladder to the maneuvering station at the top of the conning tower, rising through the cloud of exhaust fumes from the engines. The man on the pier had hauled on the short, steel brow, pulling it back onto the pier with a screech of metal on concrete. Up on the conning tower, the watch officer had been speaking on the intercom circuit. Forward on the hull, the Musaid supervised the linehandlers as they unwrapped their lines in preparation for casting off.

“We are ready?” he had asked, wedging himself into the tiny cockpit at the top of the conning tower, his eyes stinging from the diesel fumes.

“Yes, Captain,” the watch officer had replied. “More than ready. I have given main engineering control a one minute standby. That was him? I did not dream it?”

“Himself. It is a great honor. An auspicious beginning.” He had surveyed the pier. “Very well. Take in the lines.”

The watch officer had given a hand signal to the men on the pier, and the petty officers on deck slacked the mooring lines. The submarine had been rolling very slowly, a few degrees from side to side, almost imperceptibly, as if anxious to be underway. Deep in her guts, the tone of the three main engines changed as the engineers reconfigured the control boards, producing a fresh blast of smoke along the pier. The men on deck had pulled the lines onboard quickly, hand over hand to keep them out of the water. The watch officer stood high on the foot railing of the cockpit, leaning out and looking forward and aft to see the lines.

“All lines clear,” he had announced. Behind and above them, the two petty officers stationed as lookouts slipped large, black Russian binoculars around their necks, and clipped their safety belts to the periscope mountings.

“Very well. All engines back two thirds together,” ordered the Captain.

The engine noise changed to a full throated roar, and a wash of foaming water had roiled back along the submarine’s hull as the propellers bit in. Harbor debris boiled up between the submarine and the pier, and then the sub began to back out, slowly at first, and then more quickly as she gathered sternway out into the harbor. After thirty seconds her bows cleared the head of the pier, and the Captain stopped the port shaft, and ordered it ahead to begin the twist. The sub had come about slowly, vibrating as the narrowly spaced propellers opposed each other in their effort to twist the boat in place. As her head came around, beginning to point for the harbor entrance, he stopped the twist, and ordered both engines ahead. The Captain remembered glancing over to the shore; he had thought he could just see the dark staff car, stopped at the top of the hill. The submarine had gathered speed quickly, the night air pushing the diesel exhaust clear over the side.

The Captain had swept his binoculars around the harbor entrance, looking for anything out of the ordinary. Behind them the tugboat had started up, a large cloud of gray smoke hovering above her, as she headed for the pier which they had just left. The Captain had nudged the watch officer,

“The decoy,” he had said. “Our stand-in.”

“I hope it is authentic,” replied the watch officer, correcting the course by one degree to avoid a buoy. “They say those American satellites can count the shoes on the front porch of a zawiya.”

The Captain had laughed.

“They probably can, but what does it tell them? Only how many shoes there are on the mosque’s porch. Increase speed to twelve knots. We must get out to the dive point before 0200.”

The submarine had begun to pitch very gently as she met the first deep sea swell rolling in from some distant storm out over the Mediterranean. The petty officers on the foredeck finished turning the bitts under, folding each mooring line attachment point upside down and stowing it under the deckplates, while keeping an eye on the bow for any sudden waves. Each in turn made a hand signal to the conning tower, and then disappeared down the forward hatch. The Musaid had checked everything again, and then stepped down into the forward hatch, clanging it shut behind him. The Captain could remember hearing the search periscope turning in its greased tube above him as the Navigator took bearings from his station down in the attack center. The sea breeze had felt fresh and clean, containing no hint of sand and dust for a change. Their wake made a broad path behind them, parallel to the shine of the moon on the black waters. The base had remained dark, sliding aft and dwindling now as they left the harbor, with everyone there oblivious to the steady rumble of diesels carrying the submarine out of the harbor.

The Captain remembered breathing deeply, a rush of adrenaline filling his veins. It had begun. They would have to run for about an hour in order to reach deep water. Time enough. The decoy would have been in place by then, and his sub would have vanished into the black depths of the Gulf of Sidra on its way out into the middle Mediterranean Sea, safe from the probing, hostile eyes in space. Assuming the satellite could see in the dark, there would still be six, old, and inactive Soviet Foxtrot class submarines tied up to their piers, as they had been for nine months. Their entire submarine force, thought to be barely operational, and therefore no threat. He remembered baring his teeth in the dark. The Americans would be five-sixths right. The Scorpion was loose in the sea, and unaccounted for.

He was startled back to the present when the steward dropped a handful of silverware on the deck outside the wardroom curtain. He rubbed his face with both hands as he considered his next move while the subdued sounds of life in a submerged submarine intruded on the edges of his thinking. He knew that his threat to execute the next person who made a major tactical mistake was extreme, and that probably he would have to soften it in the near future. But this mission was too important. If he had to keep their attention by death threats, he would do it. Their Navy would never get another chance like this one to strike a blow against the arrogant imperialists.

He retrieved and holstered the pistol, and headed for the control room, followed silently by the Musaid who had been waiting outside in the passageway. He climbed the short steel ladder leading up into the attack center, and looked around. The watch was in place, planesman, helmsman, diving officer, conning officer. They greeted him normally. The word was not yet out, then. He swept the gauges quickly. The boat was on level keel, depth 85 meters, on a southerly heading, away from the dangerous contact to the northwest. The Musaid went to the diving officer’s position, and stood behind the planesmen.

“Report,” ordered the Captain, taking his station near the periscope well.

“Depth 85 meters, trim stable, on one shaft, speed 3 knots, quiet condition two established,” reported the watch officer, a young Palestinian. The Palestinians made the best officers, he reflected; smart, quick, and eager. And vengeful. That was important.

“We have one contact of interest,” the watch officer continued. “It appears to be a destroyer to our north and west, with sonar active.”

The Captain walked over to the sonar stack. “Audio,” he commanded.

The operator, a Bedouin boy whose ears were the most discriminating in the whole submarine force, was listening on headphones. Continuing to concentrate, he reached up and flipped a switch. Immediately the full spectrum of the ocean’s sound flooded the control room, the hissing susurration of the sea itself, the clicking and snapping of marine life, and there, in the distance, the distinctive ri-i-i-i-ng of a searching active sonar. The Captain cursed silently.

“Audio off,” he ordered. He turned to the watch officer, noticing that the Deputy had come to the control room.

“Did he approach pinging, or did he just suddenly start up from his current position?”

“We detected the screwbeats of an approaching ship, along with those of other shipping; there are many ships coming and going from the river,” replied the watch officer. “Suddenly, this one began to ping.”

The Palestinian looked over at the Deputy; he seemed to be aware that this exchange was out of the ordinary.

The Captain cursed aloud. That meant that this warship had come out silently, and then had begun to look for something. If the ship had come out from its base pinging, it would signify no more than an operational testing of their sonar. To have one come out and begin pinging in the very area where they may have been seen meant something else entirely. It had to be the fishing boat. They must have been seen.

“Make your course east, 090, into the Gulf Stream. When we encounter the sidewall temperature boundary layer, remain in that layer, and turn south, away from this destroyer. Maintain present depth.”

“It shall be done, Captain.”

— The watch officer snapped out quick orders to the helmsman. The submarine, dead silent when running on its batteries, heeled very slightly as she came around to port. The watch officer was using his head — no large rudder angles, and therefore no residual vortex left in the water for the enemy sonar to find. The Captain nodded approvingly.

The Captain went back over to the sonar console, and tapped lightly on the petty officer’s headphones. Without a word, the petty officer took them off and passed them back to the Captain, who put them on. He listened intently, absorbing the ping pattern and frequency.

“What model sonar is this?” he asked the petty officer.

“American, SQS-23,” replied the young man. “An old sonar.” The boy had been to the Soviet Navy sonar school at Sevastopol, and even the Russians had been impressed. He had acutely discriminating hearing, and genuinely loved his work.

So: this must be an older ship, thought the Captain. The newer American ships carried lower frequency sonars, which they rarely used in the active, pinging mode. The Russians said that the Americans were using exclusively passive sonar now, letting their sophisticated computers listen to the low frequency spectrum, to the inaudible sounds made by motor bearings and pump motors and transmitted as tiny vibrations through the hull into the dark sea, where they travelled for miles due to their relatively long acoustic wave lengths. Most navies had also recognized the beaconing effect an active sonar created: the pinging could always be heard by the submarine at nearly twice the distance that the submarine could be detected by the active sonar. Active pinging indicated an older ship, probably with poor or even no passive capability. Twin screws meant a destroyer, not a frigate. A frigate would have been passive. An old destroyer also meant no accursed helicopters. Their luck might still be holding.

He forced himself to concentrate, to squeeze out the background noises of the sea. The frequency of the pinging was even, not rising or falling. No discernible doppler effect. So, they were in omnidirectional mode. Not cued. Just … looking. And not going silent periodically to listen on passive equipment. No matter, he thought. For a diesel boat on the battery, passive was a waste of time. Compared to their nuclear powered sisters, with their noisy high pressure pumps and whining steam turbines, the diesel-electric submarines were quieter than the ambient noise of the sea itself. The only time they made noise detectable by passive equipment was when they went fast submerged and the screws cavitated, or when they used their diesel engines to recharge their batteries. Then they had to either surface, or to stick up a special pipe called a snorkel pipe, to get air for the diesel engines. The Foxtrot class could stay submerged for up to ten days without recharging the huge battery banks stuffed under and aft of the control room, but if they did the batteries would be seriously depleted.

The requirement to snorkel every few days was one of the reasons he had picked this area to hide in. The Jacksonville naval fleet operating areas were filled with diesel powered fishing boats, pleasure boats, and transiting merchant shipping. A submarine’s diesel engine breathing on the snorkel at night would sound like any other marine diesel to a listening passive sonar. As long as the oceans were filled with small and medium sized marine diesel engines, it was perfect cover, unless one happened to broach in full view of a fishing boat. He felt like rousting out the morning’s watch officer and shooting him right now, while this destroyer was up there, except that the enemy would probably hear it.

He pulled off the earphones and handed them back. It was time to think. Like any submariner, he wanted to put the scope up and take a look, but that would be madness now, at the beginning of a search. Perhaps later, say at 0300, when their pursuers would be tired and bored.

“The layer?”

“Sir, the layer is at 25 meters, with a secondary gradient at 80 meters.”

The Captain pondered. Good, two layers. The young Palestinian had again used his head, maneuvering the sub right beneath the second layer. The ocean tended to settle itself into horizontal thermal layers, especially near the surface, like a vast, liquid parfait. In the warm waters off northern Florida, the first layer was normally only 20 to 25 meters deep, containing water whose temperature hovered around 80 degrees. The next layer was much colder, and its thickness varied. The layers beneath the first two became progressively colder and denser. The boundaries between the layers acted like the boundary between air and water, refracting the probing sound beams of an active sonar, much like the image of a fish seen just beneath the surface in a pond is not where the fish actually is. The layer effect could thus be used to mask an object that was able to maneuver to keep the layer between itself and a searching sonar. With two layers, they were safe, and would be even safer once they merged with the vertical sidewall of the Gulf Stream, where there would be vertical thermal gradients as well as the two horizontal ones.

He pursed his lips. Maybe then they would slip back, and take a look at this destroyer. He had an urge to see who his pursuer was, if indeed he was being hunted at all. It was risky, but in these sonar conditions even the active sonar up there would be blind beyond a few thousand meters. The sound conditions were impossible. He made his decision. They would listen for a while. Keep their distance from the destroyer, and remain invisible in the swirling layers on the edge of the great ocean current. If they could find another surface contact to mask the radar image of their periscope, he would drift back, staying east of the destroyer, close to the shield of the turbulent Gulf Stream, and take a look. Practice; yes, it would be practice for the day when the Coral Sea came home. Practice makes perfect. Even the Americans believed in that.

He saw that the Deputy was watching him carefully. The Musaid had taken up his station in the control room, as he had promised. The Captain decided to leave the control room, to let the word be spread.

“I will be in my cabin,” he announced. “I will have supper in my cabin. Begin passive bearing analysis; I want to know his range. Call me if the pinging appears to be closing, or if there is sustained doppler.”

“Yes, Captain,” responded the watch officer.

“You have placed her well, Yassir,” he said to the watch officer.

“Thank you, Captain.”